When Netflix forayed into original programming by committing $100 million for two seasons of House of Cards, it did so without even watching the pilot. What made Netflix so confident that it thought this decision was a no-brainer? Big Data! Netflix is, at its core, a data-driven company that diligently

Amazon is a big data giant, which is why I want to look at the company in my second post of my series on how specific organisations use big data. We all know that Amazon pioneered e-commerce in many ways, but possibly one of its greatest innovations was the personalized

In what the US Federal Communications Commission has termed as an “unacceptable”  usage of personal consumer information for marketing purposes, telecom giant, Verizon Communications has agreed to pay a fine of $7.4 million to the US Treasury. Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said in a statement,

In a bid to reach out to more retail companies, IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson might be utilised to fabricate ‘fashion’ apps that overlay structured and unstructured data to help people decide what to wear. While at the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, IBM Watson’s global retail transformation leader Keith Mercier spoke

American retail giant Home Depot maybe the latest company to fall victim to a massive online data breach. Initial reports surfaced on cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs’ website, about a new batch of stolen credit and debit cards that went on sale in the cybercrime underground on Tuesday morning. Various banks

We recently caught up with Kevin Wong, a business intelligence professional and machine learning enthusiast, to talk about his latest project: Building a better recommender system for Steam. For anyone who isn’t familiar, Steam is a digital distribution platform for games, developed by Valve Corporation. It boasts over 75 million

The futuristic idea of shops knowing your age, gender and race when you walk into a store and targeting products accordingly is becoming a reality. Real Life Analytics, a MassChallenge startup based out of Boston, have developed computer vision software which can determine your demographic profile within 20 milliseconds of

In an effort to improve its response to buying trends and costumer preferences, sportswear giant Adidas is now starting to use the MicrosStrategy’s analytics platform which is based on SAP’s cloud-based in- memory computing platform HANA. Michael Voegele, Vice President of Global IT and Head of Enterprise Architecture at Adidas

Bol.com is an online retail portal based out of the Netherlands. They sell over 8 million products, stocking everything from entertainment to electronics, from books to jewellery. Recommending the perfect product from this vast range can be like finding a needle in a haystack; we caught up with Barrie Kersbergen,

Avansera, a Finnish consumer analytics startup, just won the 3rd place in the EU Idea “Smart Spaces” Challenge, a series of pitching competitions organised by EIT ICT labs with over 800 entrants from across Europe. They won €15,000, as well as coaching and mentoring from experts of the EIT ICT